In treating UN approval as the supreme test of a just war, we are contracting out our moral judgment to Hu Jintao and Vladimir Putin

The blogs editor keeps nagging me to write another sceptical postabout the intervention in Libya. I’m reluctant to do so, for the most obvious of reasons: our Servicemen are committed now and, whatever the rights and wrongs of the original decision, I am praying for a speedy victory. There is something repulsive about the type of anti-war commentator who, as Matthew Parris put it in his Saturday column, half hopes for the worst so that he can say "I told you so".

So, for the avoidance of doubt, I hope that the military action succeeds swiftly and completely, that casualties are minimal, that Gaddafi’s tyranny falls and that Libya gets a better government. “Beware of entrance to a quarrel,” as Polonius says, “but being in, bear't that the opposed may beware of thee.”

Still, I couldn’t help being troubled by the tone of yesterday’s debate in the House of Commons. Front- and back-benchers on both sides brandished one argument above all: we were carrying out the will of the United Nations. That assertion sounds tremendously high-minded until you think about what it means in practice. If the approval of the Security Council is the supreme test of whether armed intervention is justified, we are in effect contracting out our foreign policy to two autocracies: Russia and China.

I kept waiting for an MP to show leadership: to make a convincing case, from first principles, either for or against the air strikes. While one or two tried to do so, the vast majority, including the leaderships of all three parties, rested their case upon UN Resolution 1973. It is precisely such moral abdication that has led to the vitiation and enfeeblement of Parliament. Are A-levels being devalued? Ask the QCA. Should a new drug be made available on the NHS? Leave it to the NICE. Should we raise interest rates? Over to you, MPC. Should we attack Libya? Up to the UN.

Twenty years ago, there was a strong case for a British strike against Gaddafi. An agent of the Libyan state had murdered one of our policewomen. The Gaddafi regime had armed and sponsored a violent insurrection against the United Kingdom. Tripoli was behind the single worst terrorist atrocity ever committed in British jurisdiction: the Lockerbie bombing. Had we hit back then, I should have cheered and so, I suspect, would most of the country. But we didn’t. Instead, we went out of our way to rehabilitate the demented colonel. We kissed and made up – quite literally, as the revolting photograph of Tony Blair slobbering over the dictator reminds us. We accepted compensation for the Lockerbie victims, praised Gaddafi for abandoning his weapons programme and, disgracefully, encouraged our businesses and civic institutions to take his money. Yet now, all of a sudden, we are attacking him.

What has changed? Has his regime become any more repressive, any less democratic than it was? Has he become a greater threat to his neighbours? No. What has changed, when you boil it down, is that the Arab League asked for, and secured, a Security Council resolution authorising military action.

In other words, having failed to act against Gaddafi when there was a clear British justification for doing so, we are now acting at the behest of an international bureaucracy.

I’m no peacenik. I supported the Falklands War, the first Iraq war and the Sierra Leone campaign. I cheered the overthrow of the Taliban, though not the enlargement and prolongation of our mission in Afghanistan. I opposed the second Iraq war because, on balance, I believed the costs would outweigh the benefits. My doubts about the current campaign are similar – not least because the action is hard to reconcile with the cuts to the Royal Navy and the RAF – but I’m open to persuasion.

One thing that won’t persuade me, though, is the notion that we should feel good about military action only when Vladimir Putin and Hu Jintao have allowed it. Surely we should hold ourselves to a higher standard.